Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Politcs and Promises

Ooops! The Stock
Market crash of 1929 happened just seven months later so not too many chickens
in pots or cars in garages.

Election promises are a whole breed in themselves. They sometimes have a vague connection to
already constructed party platforms and policies. More often than not they are designed to
appeal to people’s emotions, fear being the biggest.

I’m not writing this from a political point of view,
rather from a communication one. How
are we being communicated to? (Or ‘at’
as I said in my blog last week).

Last minute election promises often feel hastily put
together and come out of recent polls or focus groups or twitter trends or
media headlines or Facebook ‘likes’.
They’re reactive rather than proactive.
And inevitably there’s a goodly bit of slung mud to ‘do down’ one or
more of the other parties.

Election promises are almost the opposite of good communication. They sometimes feel like
threats as much as promises and seem to tap into people’s dreads and apprehensions. “Vote for me and I’ll rescue you from your
worst nightmares.”

Election promises also on occasion seem to reflect an
underlying disdain that the electorate is made up of lazy thinkers who are
happy to go along with the overblown verbiage, the guarantee that all will be
well, the assurances that may not exactly be backed by too many concrete facts.

The word cynical has been bandied about for as long as
there have been elections – politicians are cynical manipulators of people’s
emotions and you can’t trust anything they say. There is certainly a degree of truth in that – politics often seems to
speak to the lowest common denominator rather than asking the electorate to
think and question.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has created an evidence
based research and policy analysis hub (General Election Hub) and
in a recent blog said:

As we
approach one of the most unpredictable general elections in recent history, one
thing is certain. The facts behind the policy statements will be in dispute –
and the public know it. This week’sNatCen pollfor the UK Statistics Authority shows that while the public
do trust official statistics, they just don’t trust the media or politicians to
present them honestly.

The way politicians communicate with the populace has
become so predictable that I really do wonder how much most of us actually hear
when we listen to them speak.

I took a survey recently, www.voteforpolicies.com (tag line –
‘Vote for policies not personalities’) and found it was a very thoughtful
approach to help with clarity of thought.
Without the rhetoric, bombast and anxiety-producing language , with just
the words, my emotions weren’t being ‘controlled’. Granted, it was a survey so there wasn’t a
lot of detail, but it still struck me that once you take away all the external
influencers and stick with the words it was easier to formulate questions, to
identify things I wanted to know more about.
I wasn’t doing my usual talking back to the telly or the newspapers or
the twitter feeds.

As I’m writing this I’m thinking – “What a shame!”

I want to be challenged, stimulated, excited and
engaged. I want my vote to count, and
unfortunately for me to even make a decision, I’m the one who has to wade
through the sea of exhortations, grandiloquence and speechifying.

I don’t want to be sceptical and feel manipulated – and I
do.

I want to be communicated to not in sound bites or over
the top emotive language but in straight-forward facts, even uncomfortable ones.

Which brings me smartly round to the whole issue of
communication. Do we ourselves
communicate in a straight-forward fashion or do we shy away from honesty if we
are concerned we won’t get the response we’d like? Are we as effective as we could be? Do we avoid the tricky questions and put a
gloss or spin on things we find uncomfortable?

Are our politicians simply communicating on a larger platform
the way many of us do in our day to day lives?